Alternate History Thread II...

[Disenfrancised]

[1] Yes, it's the OTL Mary. There is a 50% chance when a baby is concieved that it could be a male, or a female. I decided to go this route as she (or he in this case) was the only child of Catherine of Aragon that lived to reach adulthood.

53% liklyhood of being a male actually [/pedantic]

 

[North King]

Probably the greatest likelihood is that the child, male or female, dies in infancy.

 

[Sheep]

53% liklyhood of being a male actually [/pedantic]

Not so. During this time period there were more female births than male births. Futhermore 53% may be a statistic in one part of the world but I assure you in other parts of the world it is diffrent this modern day.

For example in Australia 51.5% of the populace is women. This means a few of us lucky men can take 2 girls to make sure noone misses out (if only that were really true)

 

[North King]

Not so. During this time period there were more female births than male births. Futhermore 53% may be a statistic in one part of the world but I assure you in other parts of the world it is diffrent this modern day.

For example in Australia 51.5% of the populace is women. This means a few of us lucky men can take 2 girls to make sure noone misses out (if only that were really true)

Actually, that's not true. Females were less likely to be born, but males died earlier on average, thus, there were and are more females around. But the births have always remained fairly consistent in that a few more males are born than females.

 

[Disenfrancised]

Actually, that's not true. Females were less likely to be born, but males died earlier on average, thus, there were and are more females around. But the births have always remained fairly consistent in that a few more males are born than females.

Yep, number of explanations posed for it - one of the more amusing being that male sperm swim faster without two of those cumbersome X chromosome slowing them down, thus on average are more likely to reach the prize

 

[Dachs]

The signal event in the then-current stalemate in Iberia occurred with the arrival of a Norman force from Burgundy, King Robert Guiscard at its head, at Valladolid in 1072. The Iberian King, Richard, was planning a concentrated attack on the Leonese for that summer, and the entire Hauteville dynasty of Burgundy and Iberia turned out to mass the invasion army. The Guiscard would lead an army along the coast, to Oviedo and then to Corunna. Richard’s men would march straight for Leon across the Esia River. From the start, the Iberian army was poorly led. Richard stumbled into three ambushes along the road from Valladolid before reaching the Esia, and by then his strength had been whittled down to almost half of the original size. As soon as his army began to cross the river, Leonese troops flooded out of the city and overwhelmed the Iberian army during its crossing. Richard fled to Valladolid before attempting to rejoin the Guiscard, who sent him back to his capital contemptuously, telling him to organize Valladolid’s defenses.

Naturally, Robert Guiscard had a far better time of it. The Leonese coast was up for grabs, King Bermudo IV having emptied the north of troops to defend his capital. Even the hardy Galician mountain men couldn’t oppose King Robert, who secured his supply lines with cavalry recruited from his Iberian allies. Oviedo fell that summer, and the Guiscard wintered in Corunna. With the opening of the 1073 campaigning season, the Guiscard marched south, to completely cut Leon off from the sea by capturing Portucale and Coimbra. Bermudo desperately raced after his army, but the Guiscard turned and defeated the Leonese army at Pontevedra. The next two years are a story of consistent Norman victories, as Leon shrank until finally the Guiscard’s army captured it in late 1075. It was a good thing, too, because to the south, a new power was rising and defeating the southernmost of the taifas. The Almoravids had arrived.

During the 1050s these Berber tribesmen had imposed their will on a vast stretch of the Atlantic coast; in the 1060s they made an appearance by grabbing territory from the empire Qutulmish had carved out in North Africa. In 1074, during the long siege of Coimbra, Yusuf ibn Tashfin led an army across Geb el Tarik and besieged Algeciras, invited by the rulers of several other taifas aligned against Algeciras into southern Iberia. Big mistake: the Almoravid armies continued their march of conquest, co-opting and using armed suasion to…”convince” the taifas of the south to become part of the rapidly growing Almoravid empire. Yusuf’s march north then ran smack into the Iberian defenses of Toledo in 1076. Not having been told that Toledo was impregnable, the “Constantinople of the West”, the Almoravid armies proceeded to besiege and capture it. King Richard in Valladolid died instantly when he heard the news. Without any male successors, the rulers of Iberia were happy to confer the title of “King of Burgundy and Iberia” on Robert Guiscard due to his proven military ability and relation to the former king. The Guiscard brought his army south to retake Toledo, while Yusuf’s troops kept going north aimlessly, in the general direction of Valladolid. The two armies blundered into each other at Avila, with their respective scouts first clashing in an action where the Normans lost many of their light horsemen and the Almoravid army was handicapped by losing most of their horse cavalry, leaving them mainly with camels.

The Almoravid army resembled a Hellenistic army in some respects, with a phalanx of pikemen in the center and units of javelinmen in the front and camels and horses on the flanks. Norman armies were more varied in composition, but the Guiscard had done well in this one’s formation. Commanding the left wing was his second-in-command, Geoffrey of Hauteville, and the center, largely Iberian, was under an Iberian general, Gerard of Burgos. The Guiscard took the right flank under his command. Robert’s dispositions weren’t that imaginative, with a strengthened-flanks approach that dated back to Marathon, 1,500 years ago. Expecting the strong Almoravid center to push through Gerard’s men, King Robert planned in advance and ordered Geoffrey to push his wing inward upon the flanks of the advancing pikemen. Yusuf realized that the Normans would try such an approach, but figured that his camels would startle the enemy horses on the wings, and so induce them to flight or at least a disadvantaged fight.

Guiscard’s Normans started the advance almost immediately in the morning of 15 June 1076 as both sides assembled on a field outside Avila. Going at full gallop, his men contacted the stolid phalanx of Almoravid troops. Yusuf ordered his camel cavalry forward, and an action raged on the flanks as the Norman heavy horse tried to get to grips with the nimbler Africans. Eventually Geoffrey, on his flank, began to tire of the “game” the Almoravids were playing, and dispatched some horsemen to ride into the pike phalanx’s rear. The quick-thinking Almoravid commander detached a few pikemen to hold the Norman knights at bay, but the Norman horse charged anyway, scattering the pikemen and leaving the rear of the pike phalanx open to harassment. In the meantime, Yusuf’s gamble of camels frightening the northern cavalry fell through, as the Normans used many Iberian horses to make good the losses from fighting Leon, and these Iberian horse were not particularly afraid of these camels, Iberian cavalry having had to fight them and their ilk since the death of Roderick centuries before. Robert scattered the cavalry facing him, and turned inward to attack the phalanx, and Yusuf was left with control of only his right flank, which kept dancing out of Geoffrey’s reach. He ordered a charge to clear the Norman left-flank horse, which briefly scattered, allowing him to extricate his phalanx and withdraw towards Toledo. Guiscard had his victory, but it was a costly one. The left flank and center suffered horribly, and many Norman nobles died when Geoffrey threw them into the fight with no thought to his losses. In no condition to continue the campaign, Robert moved back north to Valladolid and recuperated for awhile. The Almoravids too had lost many men, suffering some 5,000 casualties, mostly among the phalanx, to the Norman-Iberian 3,500. Yusuf was unable to continue his planned conquest of Iberia, but he was able to consolidate his realm and ensure the domination of the taifas, which ceased to exist.

In the aftermath of Avila, the Normans and Almoravids agreed on a peace treaty in early 1077: Robert and Yusuf both wanted to get back to their respective realms, anxious to ensure the safety of Burgundy and North Africa respectively. Indeed, the Guiscard was right to worry about the condition of Burgundy, left in the control of a subordinate, an Italian adventurer named Amicetas of Giovinazzo. For a vengeful Holy Roman Empire had reinvaded, and the son of Henry III was determined to secure his prize.

Henry IV had had, for the first ten years of his reign, to balance the Pope and the German landowners. He narrowly avoided open civil war with the Margrave of Meissen, Egbert II, who declared himself an anti-king in Meissen and defeated the attempts of a loyal vassal, Duke Vratislaus II of Bohemia. Only by having his tame Pope (he deserved one, honestly, with the fights he’d had with his predecessor, Alexander II, who’d had to fight a war with a Henry-sponsored anti-Pope, Honorius II), Nicholas III, excommunicate Egbert and deprive him of his support did Henry succeed, but Nicholas abruptly died in 1075, and was succeeded by Gregory VII, a staunch enemy. By this time Egbert was fortunately out of the picture, so Henry only had to fight against the Pope, and the resources of the Holy Roman Empire pitted against the pitiful temporal power of the Pope (which was even smaller than usual due to the errors of Leo IX) was not a fair match at all. Gregory needed allies, and while the Guiscard was away in 1075 he decided to ally with the Normans of Burgundy, who needed someone’s support: the King of France, in an effort to get his vassals behind him, was trying to gather support for a war on Burgundy, which he could despoil and then divide up among the winners to gain their support. His vassals, with the exception of the Burgundians of Normandy, who wanted their land back, generally disagreed with mustering their meager resources to invade something which wasn’t as guaranteed as what they controlled in the first place. When the Pope, anxious to have Norman support, ordered the King aside, it was one enemy too many, and Philip I abandoned the project.

Regent Amicetas now had the autumn of 1075 in which to campaign, but Henry struck first. Invading Burgundy with alarming speed, German troops swept through Helvetia, searching for the main Norman army. Dismayed at how easily he’d been caught off guard, Amicetas decided to wait out the winter and hope for the Guiscard’s return, but the Almoravid invasion of Iberia detained his lord. In 1076, Henry continued south, trying to force Amicetas to come to fight; reluctantly, the Norman army did make a stand, on the shores of Lake Leman in March 1076. The Holy Roman army, vastly superior in most regards, caught the Normans in an attempted flank move, a desperate stratagem by Amicetas. Undeployed and fairly unwilling to fight, the Norman army was swept away by the German tide, and Amicetas barricaded himself in the fortress of Pontarlier as Henry sat down to a siege.

These were the conditions towards which Robert sent his army at breakneck speed from Iberia across the Gulf of Lion to Arles, where he disembarked and raced up the Rhone Valley. Upon reaching Lausanne, he heard of Henry breaking off the siege of Pontarlier and coming to engage his troops; determined to have enough men to carry the fight, the Guiscard amassed as many Norman knights as he could find near Lake Leman. When Henry engaged the Normans in front of the walls of Lausanne, Robert actually had numerical superiority over the Emperor, who hadn’t actually broken off the siege but left a token force encircling the city to keep Amicetas from joining with King Robert. In the ensuing battle, Robert once again scored a victory, but this time his casualties were much lighter. Upon seeing Robert’s troops occupy a hill on the left flank of the Holy Roman army, Henry (perhaps remembering the Catalaunian Fields of 451, or maybe just stricken by an attack of common sense) ordered a withdrawal, and the brief Battle of Lausanne was over within the morning. Henry retreated to Basel and kept it despite attempts over the next five years by Robert’s commanders to dislodge him. For the moment, at least, the Pope had won out over the Emperor. For the moment, anyway.

Moving north, France stayed largely quiet for the first half of the 1070s. Guy of Burgundy’s long-overdue death in 1072 left the dukedom to his son, Richard, whose attempt to extend control over parts of Brittany failed, although he did manage to capture Jersey and Guernsey from Harold II of England in 1076, and the rest of the Channel Islands a year later. This was partly due to the English preoccupation in the north and west of their island, where Harold spent much time crushing the Welsh and establishing a hold over that region. Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, the ruler of the Welsh principalities of Gwynedd and Powys in the north, put up much resistance, but eventually was forced into insurgent warfare, hiding in the mountains and attempting hit-and-run attacks on English columns. Relative failure due to the protection Harold then placed upon his supply columns degraded the confidence the Welsh tribesmen held in Bleddyn, who was “deposed” as leader of the rebels and replaced by another Gruffydd. Welsh tribesmen were largely confined to the mountains by Harold’s death in 1079.

Scotland was ignored by Harold’s English, who engaged in some border skirmishing with the Kingdom of Alba. King Malcolm III eventually gathered a small army and tried to seize English frontier fortresses, but was killed in an ambush in 1074. The power vacuum this left in Scotland gave way to a brief civil war, in which Malcolm’s son Duncan defeated his own uncle, Donald, at the battle of Alford three years later. Duncan II managed to keep the Kingdom together, and even drove out some Norse in the north. Ireland, across the Irish Sea, continued to consist of squabbling mini-kingdoms that remained stalemated due to the lack of any one strong power among them to unify them, in sharp contrast to the events taking place a few thousand miles SEE.

Henry IV, annoyed by his consistent failure to beat the Normans in Burgundy, decided to take out his anger on the Poles to the east. Casimir of Poland had unified the country in the 1040s, while no one was looking (everyone paid attention to the Norman tide over Western Europe at that point), and the man who succeeded him, Boleslaus II, had declared himself king after Henry lost the campaign in Burgundy, taking advantage of the Imperial setback. Henry would count on the lack of support the landlords had for Boleslaus (who had seized the throne without the support of many of the richest landowners in Poland) and the comparative weakness of the Poles. Amassing a large army, he led it through the Carpathians from Prague and was nearing Breslau by early 1078. Boleslaus, thinking this an opportunity to gain a victory and the support of the landed gentry, gathered an army and headed for the Oder Valley. He crossed the river and encountered Henry’s army at Liegnitz. Henry defeated the Polish ragtag army handily and advanced to Breslau, which he besieged. Boleslaus tried to rally support for another counterblow, but the landlords, seeing this as a sign of incompetence (which it was), rebelled and forced his abdication in January 1079 as Henry wintered in Silesia. Zbigneiw of Krakow was enthroned with their support, and he concluded a peace with Henry, allowing the Emperor all of his conquests in Poland thus far and allowing de facto Imperial control over the lands of the Wends in Pomerania. Satisfied with his takings thus far, Henry returned to Germany after creating a duchy there.

Hungary, under Geza I, recouped its losses after defeat at Imperial hands ten years prior. By 1075, though, the remnants of tribes such as the Pechenegs and Cumans were knocking on the doors to Hungary, the passes through the Carpathians. Geza led an army out to attack them and won a signal victory at the Waag River that year. The King then raided southern Poland during the Silesian War of 1078-80, terrifying some German settlers in Silesia. Henry didn’t do anything about this, and by 1080 the Hungarians under Geza were a growing power in Central Europe.

The Eastern Roman Empire was beginning to have some problems. They first manifested when Isaac I died during a battle in Syria against the Sadaqid general Fuad ibn-Sadaq, who managed to retake Damascus from the Byzantines (who’d kept it for a year following its capture in 1073). Isaac’s son and successor, Adrianus, raced back to Constantinople to get himself enthroned and signed a subsequent peace treaty with the Sadaqids, recognizing the de facto line of control in Syria, almost unchanged since the death of Michael III. Adrianus (compared to his cousin Alexius, who was a far better general and statesman) was a complete idiot. To try to get the Anatolian barons on his side, he relaxed their taxes and allowed much of the army from Anatolia to go home.

A historical note is required here that goes back to the reign of Basil II: when Basil defeated the rebel Bardas Sclerus in 989, he’d asked the other what he should do to keep people like the Anatolian barons from revolting, seeing as Sclerus’ rival and fellow-rebel, Bardas Phocas, had been a major Anatolian landowner. Sclerus replied that the ‘powerful’, as they were known, should be taxed to the hilt, kept on the shortest and tightest of reins, persecuted financially, and deliberately and unfairly victimized. This way, the landowners would be far too busy and preoccupied with staying alive to go after the throne or even something lesser. Basil remembered these words and passed them on to Romanus, who noted their effectiveness and passed on his own knowledge to Michael. With Michael’s death, Sclerus’ advice had been ignored by Isaac Comnenus, who had no time to change any of the land laws before his untimely death. It fell to Adrianus to realize the right course – and, of course, he didn’t. Families like the Phocas, forced into virtual servitude these past ninety years, now saw an opportunity to rebel against their would-be savior. It took three years of comparative calmness for the Phocas to gather their forces in secret, but in 1078 John Phocas’ army of 90,000 hardy Anatolian peasant-soldiers marched through Anatolia to Abydos, just south of Constantinople, boarded ships sent by the drungarius, Leo Phocas, and sailed through the Propontis under cover of darkness to the Golden Horn, where a picked force of 1,000 men helped the Phocas storm the Sea Walls with even more inside assistance. By morning, a sleepy Adrianus Comnenus had a sword to his throat and the citizens of the city were joined by a thousand occupying Anatolian soldiers. The emperor was then unceremoniously hauled up to the Gate of Eugenius, his throat slit, and his carcass dumped in the Harbor of Phospherion.

John III Phocas came to power and immediately had to fight off an attack. After a brief civil war, the Sadaqid emirate, now under Fuad himself, had launched an attack into Syria again and conquered the fortress of Emessa, then marched north and was besieging Beroea. John left the capital with his army, already gathered, and marched through Anatolia for Antioch. Leaving a 30,000-man force to guard the city under (in retrospect this was a silly decision) his brother Leo, he took the remaining troops and confronted Fuad in front of Beroea. The Sadaqids moved up many of the besieging troops and engaged the Byzantine army, which soon was locked in an epic struggle beneath the walls. Fuad had planned for this, though: several thousand horsemen, hidden in the land around Beroea, coalesced into a fighting force during the morning and charged the helpless Byzantine flank in the afternoon, when both sides were tiring. Desperately, John sent to Leo for his reinforcements, but his brother, sensing an opportunity to gain the throne, ignored his pleas. It took the Sadaqid army three days of struggle, but the Byzantine army was eventually routed and the remainder flooded back to Antioch with John. Fuad now could sit down to a leisurely siege of Beroea, which fell a month later.

Upon his arrival in Antioch, John Phocas and the remnants of his army confronted Leo, who had planned for this in advance, unfortunately for the Basileus. Leo’s agents in the defeated army spread the word about Leo’s imperial ambitions, and when John tried to have Leo arrested and executed for treason, his army stood idly by and watched as the Emperor was set upon by Leo’s men and killed. The ambitious Leo rode to Constantinople and forced the Patriarch to crown him Emperor, then returned to Syria to try to bargain with Fuad. In the winter of 1078-9, he reached Aleppo and attempted negotiations to reclaim the city, but he was rebuffed by the Sadaqid emir, who wanted the Antiochia theme in its entirety, as well as the lands he had conquered. Eventually the two settled on a Byzantine tribute and recognization of Sadaqid conquests, and Fuad returned to Damascus to organize his pet project, an invasion of Egypt.

Leo VII Phocas held on to the Empire for the next few years, growing paranoid and suspecting everyone. He refused to marry because he thought any wife would be an assassin in disguise; he didn’t leave Constantinople for fear some enterprising soul would enter the city and try and get himself declared Basileus. Leo lashed out in terror at anyone he suspected, and had thousands murdered over his short reign. The only thing he thought he could trust was his money, and kept a hundred-man guard posted at his vaults day and night. A miser, he reverted to taxing the Anatolian landlords to the hilt not to keep them from revolting but to gain more money. Distrusting Byzantine citizens, he relied more and more on his guard of Varangians, mainly made up of Norsemen and a few Welsh and Normans. Eventually, he was forced to leave the capital in the summer of 1081 to meet a new threat. The unthinkable had happened, and the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor had aligned against the only threat they thought credible, that of the Eastern Roman Empire.

In 1080 Henry IV had been busy. Still fixated on conquering Norman Burgundy, he turned to what he believed to be easy resources: the cities of Northern Italy. Venice had filled a power vacuum in the 1070s by coercing or capturing much of…well, Venetia, and was in constant war with the Lombard cities. The Pope, still Gregory VII, supported Venice against the Lombard cities, believing the Venetians to be another ally against the Empire. 1080 saw a dramatic shift in the politics of the Po valley. Henry, seeing an opportunity, struck at the Venetian city of Trent, then moved south and took Verona, all ostensibly to relieve pressure on the cities of Lombardy. Henry pushed back the Venetians, whose army may have been Italy-class but couldn’t match the German troops. Soon the Venetians were cowering behind their navy in the Lagoon. Insisting that Lombardy join the Holy Roman Empire in exchange for protection against threats like Venice, Henry was obviously trying to gather all of northern Italy in submission to him, to menace the Pope and his ally Robert Guiscard of Burgundy.

The Guiscard, who had been rebuilding his army while allowing his subordinates to mount ineffectual attacks on Basel, which still held out against the Normans, realized too late Henry’s plan. To protect the Pope, he gathered what troops he could and marched through Mt. Cenis Pass, establishing himself at Milan. Unfortunately for him and in an amazing stroke of luck for the HRE, Pope Gregory, who, seeing the Emperor with his vast host in the Po valley and marching north with what troops he could to Robert’s support, died at Siena in August. The new Pope, Celestine I, hurriedly repudiated his support of the Guiscard and agreed to allow Henry control of northern Italy. On Papal order, King Robert dejectedly withdrew his army back through the Alps and returned to Burgundy. The stage was now set for the momentous events of the next year.

Pope Celestine, rather anxious at seeing a Byzantine army constantly parked in southern Latium, urgently requested Henry IV to remedy this threat. Henry, who was already beginning to pick up the sobriquet “the Great”, agreed, seeing a golden opportunity to put all of Italy in fief to him. A vast German host gathered south of Rome to invade and put the Byzantines to flight. The Eastern Roman catapan, Synodianos, failed to see the beginnings of this threat and sat with his army in Naples until March, when Henry’s troops flooded out of their starting blocks and captured Gaeta after a week’s siege. Synodianos fled with his 20,000 men to Bari, and sent to Constantinople for help. In the meanwhile, Henry captured all of Campania and, ignoring the field army in Apulia, swept south to Reggio di Calabria before heading north once more to blockade Synodianos in Bari. The situation was desperate.

It seemed to be Leo VII’s finest hour. Amassing a vast mercenary force of 80,000, paid mainly from his personal purse (in which, it must be said, the salaries for the mercs barely made a dent), he sailed boldly across the Straits of Hydruntum and landed in northern Apulia, threatening to cut Henry off in the heel of the boot like the Emperor Michael had done to Pope Leo decades ago. Henry, realizing the danger, left 10,000 men in front of Bari to prevent the timid Synodianos from escaping and marched north to battle with Leo. They met on the ancient field of Cannae near the Aufidus River, site of a Roman slaughter at Punic hands over a millennium before. All Europe held its breath, as it seemed like another titanic battle was to happen there now, too.

Leo and Henry didn’t disappoint.

The Germans had 70,000 men, mainly levies from Henry’s vassals. Their army, (relatively) deficient in cavalry, had many northern infantry of Norman style, mostly armed with the axe and sword. Henry and his subordinate, Conrad of Luxembourg, each controlled a wing of the army, divided in two. Leo’s army mainly consisted of Kievan Rus, Norse (and Norman), and Burgundian mercenaries, with many camel and horse cavalry troops on loan from Emir Fuad of Sadaqia. Numbering 85,000 after reinforcement by disparate elements of Synodianos’ largely scattered army in Apulia and Longibardia, and including Leo’s Varangian Guard, the wings were commanded by Leo (right wing) and his cousin Nicephorus (left wing); the center, mainly made up of the Norse, Normans, and Burgundians, was under Alexius Bryennius. The dispositions weren’t especially sophisticated, although with more men Leo had chosen to deepen his formation instead of lengthening it, for heavier striking power as opposed to the chance of enveloping his enemy. With fewer cavalry, the Germans kept almost all of their horsemen in reserve to the rear, to keep them from being lost quickly.

The Second Battle of Cannae opened on June 29, 1081 with the formation and final marshaling of the two armies on the plain. Leo, at the head of the right wing, and Nicephorus with the left charged almost instantly, leaving the infantry-heavy center under Bryennius to lag behind and try to catch up. The initial shock of the Byzantine cavalry charge took them deep through the German mass, but, as it turned out, it only weakened them in the end. Leo’s troops were so far ahead of their infantry that they were quickly trapped by the vast German mass. The Byzantine cavalry was nearly cut to pieces, and Leo only barely managed to extricate a few cavalry, leaving many to die at the hands of Henry’s axemen, including his own brother Nicephorus. Taking command of both wings of cavalry, Leo then husbanded his infantry as they continued on to engage the thus-far victorious Germans. Henry’s troops charged across the plain and engaged the Byzantine mercenary infantry. During the struggle, Alexius Bryennius managed to fight his way through the mob of fighting troops toward Henry. He and a few Norman mercenaries cut through Henry’s bodyguard and were about to set upon the helpless Emperor, but Conrad arrived in the nick of time with his own men and killed Bryennius. Eventually, Leo was forced to launch a cavalry charge to restore the situation and allow his infantry to disengage and retreat to camp, to continue tomorrow; his foolhardy headlong advance stopped the Germans cold for a few minutes, then they began to rally and in the blood, dust, and confusion, Emperor Leo was killed. Almost instantly, the Byzantine mercenary army disintegrated and fled back to camp, all of its leaders slain. Henry then unleashed his cavalry and swept the few remainders off the field. Only 23,000 mercenaries survived to reach the Byzantine camp, and when Henry approached them with an offer to reenlist (he needed to replenish his army from its horrific losses), they agreed.

The epic struggle was over; Byzantine Italy was lost. Catapan Synodianos and his 7,500 remaining soldiers capitulated on the news of Leo’s death. Henry overran the rest of Apulia and then returned north to Rome and the end of the campaigning season, worried about the threat of the Guiscard in his rear. In the Empire itself, Phocas left no successor – Nicephorus, his only real remaining relative residing (ha ha, lots of consonance!) in Byzantium, had died on the field of Cannae, and the Phocas line was virtually extinct. In Constantinople, people yearned to return to the old Macedonian days, but that bloodline was gone, too. The only real choice remaining were the Comneni, and a populace anxious for revanche watched as Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople crowned Alexius Comnenus Basileus in St. Sophia on July 6. He had work to do. The headless Empire had lost land in the Sirmium Theme to Hungary in addition to all of Italy to the HRE, and an aging Qutulmish was in Sicily, besieging Palermo. In the East, Emir Fuad had stayed quiet in his north, as per the agreement with Alexius’ predecessor (although he was engaged in an action further south – see below), but the fortresses of Dara and Aghtamar were under siege by a new threat – that of the Khwarezmian Empire.

 

[Dachs]

Now we return to the decade of the seventies, when the Middle East lay shattered by a decade of civil war. The only viable powers in the Muslim world were the growing Almoravid empire in the west; Qutulmish’s emirate in North Africa, continuing constant low-level warfare against the Almoravids in Ifriqiya; the Sunni-ruled emirate of Egypt; and the Seljuk Turk empire under Malik Shah north of the Amu Darya. Persia and Mesopotamia were dotted with tiny states carved out by petty rulers. This state of affairs would not last for long, and indeed, a new power was rising. Khwarezm, on the other side of the Amu Darya from Malik Shah’s Seljuks, was ruled by another of these petty rulers, Anush Tigin. From his capital at Merv (even that was seized from Khorasan during the civil wars), he slowly began to extend his power to the Dasht-e Lut. With no real power to stand in his way, and with an able Turkish general, Kutluk, commanding his armies, by 1075 all land in a box running from the Amu Darya to the Persian Gulf and from the Zagros Mountains to the Punjab was under Anush Tigin’s control. After a brief period of war with Malik Shah’s Seljuks in 1076-8, he agreed to what was supposed to be an ‘Eternal Alliance’ with the Great Seljuk and switched his attention to the heretofore ignored Mesopotamia. A rump Abbasid Caliphate still controlled land around Baghdad and Kufah; in 1079, upon threat of war, the Caliph declared Anush Tigin to have the title that Abu Kalijar once coveted, Shahanshah. The Khwarezmian rulers were now the Kings of Kings.

Mesopotamia, dotted with petty emirates and kingdoms, was finally subjected to Anush Tigin’s domain by the winter of 1080, which saw the epic siege of Mosul, not far from the Byzantine lands. Instantly Anush Tigin began to covet such rich lands, so ill-protected during the reign of the Phocas Emperors. Upon word of the Battle of Cannae the following year, he ordered Kutluk to besiege the easternmost fortresses of Byzantium, as a precursor for an invasion of the rich land of Anatolia. Alexius rushed troops there upon his coronation, but due to a pro-Phocas uprising in Bithynia he was detained. Dara, Nisibis, and Aghtamar all fell, and the Khwarezmians began to irrupt into eastern Anatolia.

The Byzantines were now at a crisis point. As soon as Kutluk’s armies occupied Theodosiopolis and Colonea upon the fall of Aghtamar, Alexius, now marching to Ancyra, was horrified to learn of the capitulation of Edessa, Samosata, and Melitene. With relative ease, the Khwarezmians had broken through the main perimeter of fortresses guarding the heart of Byzantium. Anatolia seemed doomed. Alexius, with the few troops he could coerce from the Anatolian barons, marched to the fortress of Amasia, near Sinope. He was drawn away, however, by news of a siege of Caesarea, the main city of central Anatolia. With much of the army’s cavalry, he rode off, leaving 50,000 men under control of the general Andronicus Ducas, his relative through Alexius’ marriage to Irene Ducas (which had secured him the assistance of one of the most important families in the Empire). Upon Alexius’ arrival at Caesarea, he found that the siege here had been a ruse, and that a false message had been sent through Khwarezmian spies to draw part of the army here. Realizing the main army’s peril at Amasia, he doubled back to the fortress, to find that Andronicus had taken the army and marched out to confront the Khwarezmians at Nicopolis. Alexius set off with his 5,000 horse to Nicopolis, hoping to arrive there before it was too late.

Ducas, however, decided to bring Kutluk to battle before Alexius’ arrival. At Nicopolis on the 26th of August, 1081, Andronicus Ducas faced the Khwarezmian horde under Kutluk and with Shahanshah Anush Tigin watching. The eastern army refused an engagement with the Byzantines as Andronicus chased after them across the field. As evening neared, an observer from the sky would have seen a mass of Byzantine troops at a point equidistant from all of the Muslim troops, who were arrayed in a crescent formation. The Byzantines were drawn further and further into the crescent until the center finally allowed the Byzantines to bring it to battle. Finally, the Roman troops were able to come to grips with their enemy, achieving great success and hewing their way through the Khwarezmian center. For half an hour it looked as though the Byzantines could finally win and recover their lost provinces. That was when the sides of the crescent collapsed in on the Roman troops and encircled them. The densely packed mass of Byzantine troops was crushed in on itself. Andronicus Ducas led a forlorn hope charge to try to break through, but the charge was repulsed and he was killed. As the Roman numbers dwindled, though, help arrived. Alexius Comnenus and his cavalry reached the field and plunged into the rear of the Khwarezmian army, and the ring around the Roman troops was broken. Byzantine soldiers flooded out under the protection of the cavalry, who desperately tried to keep the ring from closing before the troops could be extracted. When the jaws of the trap snapped shut again, 20,000 of Ducas’ men had been rescued. The Khwarezmians took no prisoners.

With the remnant of his army, Alexius marched to Gangra in Paphlagonia to keep the Khwarezmians from sweeping over the Empire, but there was no disguising the unmitigated disaster that had just occurred. The Anatolian soldiers had been robbed of their soldiers by the Phocas; now, when they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the troops from those desperate measures had been wasted in a stupid pursuit by Ducas. After Nicopolis, the Khwarezmians were able to overrun the eastern two-fifths of Anatolia, penetrating all the way to the fortress of Ancyra before being checked by Alexius with his meager remainders and withdrawing to Amasia. Trebizond held out during the winter, but that was the only real ray of hope. As 1082 dawned, the future of Byzantium looked very bleak indeed.

That of the Sadaqids in Egypt, though, was very bright. In a lightning-fast invasion in 1080, Emir Fuad defeated the Egyptians and captured virtually the entire country, and the following year he waged war successfully against the Makkurans, seizing most of that territory, too. Now Alexius swallowed his pride and decided to ask for help. Without help from one quarter or another, it was obvious that the remainder of Anatolia would be lost to the eastern invaders, and the Sadaqids were the closest that could help. Upon Fuad’s arrival in Damascus in April 1082, he was met by ambassadors from Alexius, asking for help against the Khwarezmians. Alexius took care to have them sprinkle words such as “Sunni schismatics”, “eastern barbarians”, and “heretics” in the message, and also hinted that he was willing to give up some territory from the land that the Khwarezmians had conquered in exchange. The emir, seeing a chance to balance his western and southern gains with conquest in the east, agreed, but he also shrewdly demanded some money as well. Desperate for help, Alexius agreed. A Sadaqid army with a sixty-year old Fuad at its head set off from Aleppo and immediately made good on the agreement by taking Edessa and Samosata from Kutluk’s rearguard. These the emir claimed as his repayment, and after leaving a garrison there marched to Caesarea to meet with Alexius’ army, which he’d mustered from the Balkans and assorted mercenaries (most of which were understandably nervous, what with the quality of Byzantine military leadership these days).

Kutluk and Anush Tigin had mainly consolidated over the winter, which was dominated by the ongoing siege of Trebizond, whose garrison, under George Palaeologus, still got reinforcements from the capital via the sea, which the Shahanshah could not control. On the news of the rapid fall of Samosata and Edessa and the gathering armies at Caesarea, Kutluk concentrated his army and marched for the fortress of Arabissos. The fall of Arabissos would cut the Sadaqid Emir off from his recent conquests in Mesopotamia and, Anush Tigin hoped, would precipitate the end of the alliance. His stratagem was fairly transparent, though, and the Allied leaders came up with a plan: empty Arabissos of its garrison (the loss of the fort would be temporary; for now, they needed men) and lie in wait for the Khwarezmians in Lycandos Theme. Kutluk, surprised and gratified by the easy fall of Arabissos, continued to drive his wedge between the two allies and marched for Tarsus.

Just outside of Tarsus, at the town of Anazarbus, the Byzantine and Sadaqid army lay in wait for the Khwarezmians. The winter had been hard on the eastern cavalry, which, largely deprived of feed, was sent back east with Anush Tigin (who wanted to return to his capital anyway) to guard frontiers and such. Thus, the Sunni army had no scouts, and no warning of the ambush, which made it so much more effective when it was sprung. Nearly 100,000 allied troops, most of them Sadaqid, flooded upon Kutluk’s army as it passed through a pass in the Anti-Taurus Mountains by Anazarbus. Kutluk, leery of abandoning his siege equipment, tried to make a stand of it, and by evening the Sunni troops were trapped in the pass, barricaded by the bodies of their own men. At nightfall they tried a breakout; many troops were able to flee before the Sadaqids cottoned on and the allies sent the cavalry after their enemies.

At a stroke the Khwarezmian army was nearly destroyed and Kutluk was forced to flee to Baghdad, where he sent for help from the Shahanshah. There was little hope, though. By the time the help had arrived, the war was largely devoted to sieges of Khwarezmian garrisons in the citadels of Byzantine cities. Alexius’ army, whose ranks swelled from the freed peasants in the eastern themes and George Palaeologus’ army, which destroyed the covering force at Trebizond, soon reached Theodosiopolis and besieged it. For four years, the Byzantines in Anatolia and the Sadaqids in Mesopotamia pushed the Khwarezmians back with every citadel recaptured. After the fall of Baghdad to the Sadaqids and Aghtamar to the Byzantines, the Shahanshah was forced to come to a cease-fire in 1087. Byzantium was brought back to its 1025 borders in the East (not a full recovery, but not that bad, either), and the Sadaqids were allotted all Mesopotamia up to the Zagros Mountains, with the Khwarezmians retaining eastern Armenia to the Caspian coastline. Alexius was now free to return to the West, where a score needed to be settled with the various powers that had taken Byzantine lands there.

Henry IV the Great, Holy Roman Emperor, died in 1085. He could look back on twenty years’ reign that brought the HRE new power and prestige, and restored the fortunes of the Empire in many ways. Burgundy had been forced to come to heel, and Robert Guiscard, the now-aging King of Iberia and Burgundy, was made powerless to oppose Henry, with Papal support. Italy had been absorbed into the Empire, and the Easterners forced to accept the loss as their eastern domains were attacked by the Khwarezmians (whose progress Henry had followed with excitement until the defeat at Anazarbus) and Sicily was largely occupied by Qutulmish, who had captured Syracuse and Palermo before his death in 1083. Poland now obeyed the dictates of the Emperor, and the King of France, absorbed in struggles with his own vassals, was in no condition to argue with Imperial hegemony. Only Hungary had not been punished for her brief raids into Silesia, and the Emperor decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. He died content and at the top of his game. If the Empire had had a worthy successor, it would probably stay that way for him, too.

Instead, the Holy Roman Empire enthroned Henry V. On his accession, he decided to use the power he had and antagonize his greatest ally, Pope Celestine, by forcing him to agree to allow the Emperor to appoint Church officials in his realm. Celestine was too weak to do anything about it, having given away much of his power to Henry the Great. It inflamed opinion largely against the Emperor, especially in conquered Italy. By 1088, the controversy was so widespread that Henry had problems traveling in the open without being attacked by a mob of would-be bishops or cardinals. He refused to end what was already being called “the Investiture Controversy”, though; instead, he was even firmer. After five years in power, Henry had filled the major positions of the German and Italian parts of the Church with his handpicked cronies, who upon Celestine’s death elected another weak Pope, Callixtus II, who again acceded to Henry’s increasing demands.

Increasing public dissatisfaction with Callixtus led the Guiscard, now in his early seventies, to invade the Holy Roman Empire through the passes in the Alps in 1089, with the stated intention of deposing the Pope and Emperor and restoring to the Papacy its rights. With his son Bohemund, King Robert took Milan that spring and set up an anti-Pope, formerly the Bishop of Milan, Celestine II. Henry’s reaction was swift. Crossing with a German army into the Po valley, Henry engaged Bohemund’s troops and put them to rout at Pavia in May, then tried to come to grips with the Guiscard. Robert, who reluctantly realized how outnumbered he was, sent envoys to the Doge of Venice, Domenico Salvo, asking for help. The Venetians, anxious to revenge themselves upon the Holy Roman Empire, agreed, and in July sent a small army (as much as they could muster) under the Doge to threaten Henry’s rear. The Emperor realized that he had two choices: withdraw south with his army and be cut off from Germany, or withdraw north and be cut off from Rome and the Pope. He couldn’t attack the Venetians because the Guiscard was so close that he could easily reinforce them or appear mid-battle and hit the German army in the rear, and vice versa. Deciding that he could abandon Rome and Italy (where most people hated him anyway), Henry stalled for time by feinting first at one army, then another, while waiting for reinforcements and for the Pope to leave Rome, trusting that he could then invade Italy with another, larger army and reinstate Pope Callixtus. He managed it; and in August Henry fled north through the Trentino and through Brenner Pass to increase the size of his armies in preparation for a hammerblow on his enemies.

Guiscard entered Rome later that month and installed Pope Celestine II, who at once excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor and declared his investitures null and void. However, the Pope needed an Emperor of his own to rally around, and seeing the chance to improve relations with the East, he summoned an ecumenical council in Rome to discuss the main points of contention between the Eastern and Western Churches. (He probably saw Alexius’ defeat of the Khwarezmians as a sign that the East was beginning to come back from the disasters of the previous decade and wanted to ally with what he believed was the stronger side.) The Basileus, himself an expert diplomat, jumped at the chance for an ally in addition to Venice, still a supporter of the Byzantines and still maintaining the extreme West of Byzantium from being taken over by Hungarians or such. So it was that first, in a gesture of goodwill, Pope Celestine visited Rome in the winter of 1089-90, and in exchange, not only the Patriarch of Constantinople but most of the bishops of the East went to the Lateran for an ecumenical council to smooth relations between the two churches.

King Robert and Emperor Alexius briefly exchanged pleasantries in Rome, but soon the Norman King was drawn away from the council for another reason; the Almoravids were making trouble in Iberia again. On the death of Yusuf ibn-Tashbin in the (successful for the Almoravids) siege of Abdul-majid ibn-Ifriqiya’s (Qutulmish’s son) capital of Tunis in 1084, the Almoravids experienced a brief succession crisis and civil war that stretched from Ghana to the Geb el-Tarik. When the dust cleared, Ali ibn Yusuf, Yusuf’s son, was now the Almoravid leader. He spent time consolidating his control and invading what was left of the Turkish Ifriqiyan empire, and was apparently so brutal that the Turkish warriors on Sicily, instead of surrendering to the bloodthirsty Almoravids, gave up their lands to Alexius’ Byzantines, who had finally been able to take an interest in restoring Sicily in 1088. The following year Ali spent gathering an army in southern Iberia; in early 1090 his troops invaded the Guiscard’s southern domains, only encountering his younger son, Tancred. Tancred attempted to hold back Ali’s army at Cuenca, but his troops were decisively defeated and he fled north, sending requests for help to his father.

The Guiscard left Bohemund in Italy as a continuing gesture of goodwill (where the young man apparently developed something of a friendship with the Emperor of the Byzantines before Alexius was forced to return to Constantinople – trouble from the Hungarians) and sailed with his Italian army across the Mediterranean to Barcelona, barely missing a storm along the way. Quick-marching inland, he met with Tancred’s troops on the Ebro at Huesca and with a combined army of 30,000 men – huge for the Normans – moved to counter Ali, who was besieging Segovia. Ali refused to break off the siege, and simply built a wall of contravallation to protect his rear. When the Norman-Iberian army arrived at Segovia, they began to besiege the besiegers, getting the Almoravids stuck between the army and the walls of Segovia. Julius Caesar had been in such a predicament at Alesia; but Caesar had more skill than Ali ibn Yusuf, and Vercingetorix was no Guiscard. Robert, realizing that the besiegers had less food than the fortress of Segovia, knew that Ali would have to break out eventually. Indeed, the Almoravid army was forced to attempt a breakout thrice, only managing to penetrate the Guiscard’s defenses the third time and get Ali with about half of his army out. The rest, under a subordinate commander, surrendered to the Normans, and Robert began to pursue Ali.

Finally, the Almoravid remnants regrouped at the great fortress of Toledo. Toledo, “the Constantinople of the West”, had only seen its defenses strengthened since its fall to the Almoravid armies under Yusuf a few decades prior. It was a formidable obstacle, preventing movement south across the Tajo. The Guiscard knew that the citadel would be a tough nut to crack, but he had to try. Only with Toledo would his Iberian possessions be secure. And so, in the fall of 1090, King Robert I Guiscard of Burgundy and Iberia sat down to besiege the great fortress city of Toledo. At the start, the Normans had a slight advantage. They had many siege engines, and these were brought up from Valladolid, based in many ways on the machines that had cracked the city of Leon for the Guiscard in 1075. From his Byzantine allies, Robert had managed to secure even more siege engine designs and the assistance of many engineers, skilled at breaking open such citadels and honed by the Anatolian War of the past few years. The Guiscard’s troops set to work hewing trees and building a wall of circumvallation, which provided the jump-off point for several assaults. Ali, who despite his faults wasn’t a bad general, energetically directed the defense, ordering the construction of catapults to hammer the Norman devices from the safety of the walls. Robert’s troops escalated with the construction of their own catapults, drawing on Byzantine knowledge of ancient Greek torsion weapons and the amazingly accurate trebuchet. Soon, Ali’s catapults were knocked out, and the besieged began to look at other means, such as digging mines under the walls of circumvallation, to which the Normans not only dug countermines but also dug their own ones underneath the Toledan walls. A battle underground ensued while both sides tried to first collapse their mines and then tried to use them to irrupt into the other’s position. Eventually, the Normans won the underground battle due to the superior quality of their heavy infantry, and the Guiscard sent more troops in, securing parts of the city bit by bit in bloody street fighting.

It took a year and a day, but by October 1091 Robert had control of the citadel of the fortress-city. Ali had managed to escape with a few horsemen, though, and went to Granada for the winter, where he patched up a peace agreement with Robert, who had a larger mission on his mind: the total destruction of the Holy Roman Empire. He was getting very old, nearing his eighties, but he still remained a vigorous fighter, and was still determined to defeat or perhaps displace Henry V. However, we will pass over King Robert for now, and take a brief overview of the picture of Europe in its entirety over the past decade or so.

 

[Dachs]

From Northwest to whatever direction I feel is closest: the Kingdom of Alba in Scotland, still ably led by Duncan II, continued to slowly drive the Norse out of the northernmost reaches of the country. Scotland continued to stay largely quiet other than the constant fighting in the north, but apparently the northerners were simply too busy elsewhere to worry about the Scots fighting down south. Otherwise, it’s likely that they would have tried to prevent the grinding down of their colonies. Anyway, Ireland continued to consist of a few kingdoms battling each other in endless stalemate, with no real change from before. Norman adventurers did try to interfere with the internecine conflict, with a force of about a hundred knights assisting the king of Munster at the battle of Sixmilebridge in 1082, but with a lack of plunder and easily takable land in Ireland, the Normans petered out, looking for better conquests in France, Italy, and Germany.

England, after Harold II’s death in 1079, continued on his bloodline with Harold III Ulf, who attempted to break into the mountain holds of the Welsh and failed. Unable to really hold onto most of his father’s Welsh holdings, Harold III instead recognized Gruffydd as a vassal in 1081, and limited his holdings to Gwynedd and Powys. Gruffydd, a very opinionated (or “stubborn&#8221 “freedom-fighter”, refused to serve under any English King, instead insisting that all Cymru be freed. Harold, after being told that “Cymru” meant “Wales”, angrily reversed the earlier policy and led armies into Wales, which were soundly beaten after stupidly venturing into the mountains held by Gruffydd’s partisans. Eventually, Harold grew bored of the conflict and allowed his vassals to carry on the war, while he concentrated on the south.

Through intermarriage and deceit, King Robert had managed to secure in fief much of Gascony and southern Aquitaine, and Richard’s family had gotten a large chunk of Brittany and Flanders. Open clashes often occurred in Anjou, which the King of France largely ignored, because he could do very little about it. Philip I’s power was weakening all the time, and France was becoming a battleground between the opposing families of Hauteville and Burgundy (which was beginning to become an anachronism). Eventually Philip began to assert himself by attempting to order his two enemies to back down and withdraw their claims to the land in Western France, which would be absorbed into the royal demesne. He was ignored, and soon began to side with the Guiscard, who seemed less interested in gathering French land as that of Germany, as opposed to Richard (who died suddenly in 1087, leaving the dukedom to his son Eudo I), who had no other options except for England, whose King still resented the loss of the Channel islands years before.

Upon Eudo’s ascension, he was surprised to find that the English had sent a small fleet into the Channel, and Harold III himself was in command. The force captured the Islands with no real opposition, and continued to Cherbourg, where the English landed an army of about 10,000 men and began to secure the Cotentin Peninsula as a base for further operations. The tiny Burgundo-Norman navy was actually captured in its Cherbourg docks. Eudo, still worried about Norman-Burgundian troops in Anjou and Poitou, had to rush most of his men north towards his core territories, while Harold leisurely expanded his control of the Peninsula to Avranches and St.-Lo. Eudo’s tired men were rushed to the battle as quickly as possible. Eudo attempted to confront Harold’s rested army at Vire, but was too timid and decided to withdraw. Faced with the prospect of the army of the Ulf deep in his dukedom, the Burgundians made a stand at Flers, where the experienced Englishmen, who had honed their skills fighting the Welsh in the mountains, drove them off, especially since Eudo failed to use his horses effectively, one of his major advantages over the English. Eudo, who was rapidly losing his ability to hold his men together, sent word to King Philip in hopes that he would aid his vassal, but Philip was happy to be rid of him. Following the King’s refusal to help him, Eudo tried an attack on the English as the army advanced towards Caen, but at Ciecy the English counterattacked and the Burgundian army disintegrated. Eudo fled, and Harold set up his own vassal in Normandy and Flanders, which was accepted by Philip of France, who neither cared nor had a choice in the matter. Besides, now Eudo was confined to Brittany and the mouth of the Loire. Burgundian power was largely broken now.

The Holy Roman Empire still held Germany, half of Poland, Holland, and much of northern Italy, but Henry V had suffered a great loss of prestige as a result of the forced withdrawal at Norman and Venetian hands. Parts of the Empire had fallen away since Henry IV’s accession, and, for example, southern Italy was no longer under anyone’s control at the time of the Lateran council. The HRE-instated Dukes of Salerno, Calabria, and Apulia had fled, and the land was becoming lawless. In an effort to restore to the Empire a measure of its standing, Henry had tried to invade Poland in 1090. Unfortunately for him, Poland was no longer the Empire’s punching bag. King Zbigniew and his successor Wladyslaw I had strengthened the Polish army and deprived the landed gentry of much of their power, seemingly taking a hint from Bardas Sclerus. Upon Imperial invasion in autumn 1090 the Polish army, personally led by the King, managed to defeat the Emperor at Posen through its rather skillful use of the limited cavalry they had, and continued on to besiege Breslau. The Emperor was powerless to resist and when the city fell the following spring, he quickly sent emissaries to try to end hostilities and hammer out an agreement. Reluctantly, the Emperor confirmed the Polish control of the eastern two-thirds of Silesia, but in return, Wladyslaw I now had the title of Duke (Ksiaze), and was now the Imperial vassal, although he exercised great control over his vast domain, such that it was more like the Duchy of Poland and Silesia was independent in truth if not in name. The remainder of the year Henry spent putting down various anti-Kings throughout his realm and steeling himself for the titanic struggle that would probably ensue.

A trip east and south finds the Hungarians and Byzantines locked in conflict that really didn’t have to be decided (everyone knew who would end up winning the war), but when Emperor Alexius led his army into what had been the Sirmium Theme, he was met by a sizable Hungarian force under a general, Geza. After inconclusive skirmishes, Alexius managed get round behind the Hungarians – penetrating into Hungary itself – to land a heavy blow near Cibalae (Vincovci) in November of 1090 that cut off Geza’s army in Sirmium itself, and, preferring to save the army rather than lose it in a prolonged siege when the outcome was no longer in doubt, the Hungarians surrendered their claims to the Byzantines’ land and withdrew north of the Sava. Alexius spent part of the following year restoring the thematic government and settling some of his soldiers there, then moved back to Anatolia to collect troops from his strategoi and returned to Italy.

Kievan Rus, seeing the loss of a large amount of its trade due to the restabilization of the Middle East and the traditional trade routes, began to lose peripheral territory in fact if not name. By 1085 the Kievan Rus were completely split up into several principalities, all of which vied for complete control of the rapidly degenerating carcass. Eventually the situation developed much like that of Ireland, with the various princes unable to break above a stalemate in many ways, so that by 1090 the region was in decline. While still able to rely on trade through the Black Sea from Constantinople into the Dnieper and on to the East, the serious damage to the Byzantine economy also ruined that of the north. Eastern Europe was returning to backwater status slowly, if inexorably.

Speaking of the Byzantine economy, it seemed as though Alexius would get no rest. Due to the massive spending of the Phocas and, to a slightly lesser extent, Michael III – and the loss of some of the major trading eastern Themes – the Byzantine nomismata was virtually worthless. Several versions of it in many different metals were circulating throughout the Empire. While on campaign in the Sirmium Theme Alexius devised a new standard of coinage, made from gold and designated the hyperpyron. Much of the gold for the hyperpyroi came from the coffers of the Church, whose Patriarch had not hesitated to put the money into Alexius’ hands during the various times of threat to the nation. Eventually, the Byzantine economy leveled out not far from rock-bottom (there was a point where Eastern Roman coinage was worth the same as that of Kievan Rus) and began to slowly recover, with Alexius’ recapture of part of the eastern Themes and introduction of a higher-valued currency part of the resurgence.

Africa’s North was the only part that really concerns us, and here there were two major powers whose only border regions were so remote that neither cared about the other. The Almoravid empire stretched from the edge of Ghana to central Iberia and from the Atlantic to the eastern edge of Ifriqiya, the city of Tarabulus, or Tripoli. Sadaqid power was more limited in Africa but included Libya and Egypt as well as most of northern Makkura, in addition to their main power base in Palestine and the Hejaz, and their outlying territories in Mesopotamia they had essentially received from the Byzantines for assistance in the rather lopsided Khwarezmian war. The Almoravid ruler, still Ali by 1091, managed to keep his hold on his territory through sheer bloodthirstiness and use of military force on anyone and anything that opposed his rule (including some mysterious black-and-white birds that appeared on the Mauretanian coast and asked in an obscure Berber language, for negotiations with Ali. Naturally, the confused soldiers cut them down). He then went on a brief jaunt to Ghana, which the Almoravids destabilized and plundered to restore their coffers after the loss of Toledo and outlying lands. By 1092, Ali was flying high again, except for the fact that he died of heart failure in March. (I swear! His heart just stopped after a knife mysteriously appeared in it!) The Sadaqid emirate after the death of Emir Fuad in 1089 suffered a brief loss of territory and money in Makkura but regained it through the actions of Fuad’s son, Abu.

Khwarezm showed signs of beginning to collapse in the two years following defeat at Byzantine hands, but wily old Anush Tigin was able to save the situation by ruthlessly putting down all of the major rebellions in a way that mimicked Ali ibn Yusuf thousands of miles away. His death in 1089 opened the way for his grandson, Ala ad-Din Aziz, or simply Ala, to take over as Shahanshah. After the perfunctory brief civil war, Ala controlled all of what his grandfather had bequeathed to him, and set out to conquer something. His attempts in 1091 to go across the Amu Darya and attack the Seljuk Turks ended in ignominious failure, and he soon patched up relations with Malik Shah and concentrated on internal improvements. Malik Shah, on the other hand, had kept busy these past years. Between war with Khwarezm in 1078 and war again in 1091, Malik Shah had built a state that could last a bloody long time. His reconstruction of the army from the ground up resembled that of his predecessor, Toghrul Beg. Malik Shah saw that the route to conquest was not south, where Khwarezm lay, too powerful to die easily unless an alliance with Byzantium or the Sadaqids happened: and coalition warfare simply did not happen with as much territory as the Khwarezmians held separating the two allies. The Seljuks accordingly began to expand into the deserts and wastes to the north, through old Turkestan, seizing much Cuman (or Kipchak) land. It was short on money, obviously, but money came this way, to the East, and the route to China. Malik Shah didn’t need a lot of money, especially with India in ferment as it was.

The stage is now set for the great war against the Holy Roman Empire, which would see that Empire’s greatest enemies pitted against it in a true clash of wills, something of an 11th Century All-Stars. Indeed, as the Lateran Council began to die down and come to an end, neither side having really conceded much but an important diplomatic victory attained by both, Henry began to build his army again, ready for the critical campaign of 1092, which would doubtless be fought in the flood plains of the Po valley and throughout northern Italy. Germanic hordes began marshaling for war, and the Emperor managed to cajole even his Polish vassal, Duke Wladyslaw, into sending a sizable contingent for the army, which prepared to cross the Brenner Pass and descend into Italy, where the armies of the Guiscard, Venice, and Byzantium (whose Emperor had agreed to help in return for having Apulia and Calabria restored to the Empire of the East) coalesced and prepared for their own part.

Then, Henry V died on a nice day in March 1092. Hurriedly, his son and presumed successor, Otto IV – a practiced general who had assisted his father greatly during the last years of his life, asserted his control and demanded that the Pope crown him Holy Roman Emperor…or he’d unleash this army on Italy. Pope Celestine II, who was being seen as a pretty good Pope, refused categorically. Unless the Church offices in Germany that had been appointed by Henry V were evacuated and Papal appointees put back in their place, Otto would remain King of Germany. In response, Otto sent his vanguards pouring through the passes into Italy, where the van of his army handily defeated a Venetian covering force at Meran in May. As was characterized by many Imperial campaigns into Italy, Otto’s army spread out into Venetia and crushed the Venetian army, which had been trapped by the slow advance of the Byzantines (who were still without Alexius) and the Normans (as Robert Guiscard was convalescing in Nice, recovering from a winter illness). He and his German (for they can’t be called Imperials, now can they?) army advanced to the Lagoon and was once again prevented from crossing by the Venetian navy. This time, though, Otto didn’t waste time at Aquileia fuming at his inability to cross, like his father and grandfather. Rather, the King immediately set his army towards the Norman one, racing to reach the army, under Bohemund, before the Byzantines could reach the north from their current job of consolidating the easily retaken but difficult to hold southern part of Italy. Bohemund, realizing his danger, began to execute a withdrawal upon his main base, Milan. Otto pressed his attack, and soon the van of his army was engaging a Norman force, which managed to repulse three successive attacks on the bridge at Verona before they were forced to withdraw after Otto crossed the river further downstream. In doing so, the Norman covering force probably saved Bohemund’s army.

Bohemund was able to withdraw further into Lombardy, and used his rather extensive chain of fortress cities – left there from centuries of internecine conflict – to slow down Otto in lengthy sieges while Bohemund himself gathered more men from Burgundy and Iberia and his father recuperated from his illness. At least, that was the plan. Otto, however, cottoned on quickly, and after the three-week siege and assault of Mantua he left it as a bastion against pressure from the Normans and sent his army south across the Po into northern Tuscany, to cut off the Pope and the Byzantines from their Norman allies. Otto, however, was distracted by the landing of a Venetian army – only about 500 men – at Ravenna, which his men had captured during his current march to Pisa. Leaving his general Conrad of Styria in command of the army bound for Pisa, he himself took a picked force of 3,000 men – 2,000 cavalry and the rest infantry – to break what he believed to be a blockade of Ravenna. Upon Otto’s arrival at Ravenna, though, he was greeted with the news that the Venetians had been met by a sally from the garrison – only 300 soldiers left the fortress city – and crushed two days earlier, when Otto had first set out. Infuriated, the King of the Germans returned to his army, slowly moving through the valley of the Arno, not yet to Florence, and assumed command. One can safely say that if Otto had been with the army, moving fast to his objective those crucial days, Pisa would have fallen before troops could be brought up. As it was…well, you’ll see.

By this time (early summer 1092) Alexius had reached Italy and taken command of his army, now largely finished with the pacification of Apulia and Calabria. (Salerno and Campania were officially under Papal control, an unprecedented increase in temporal Papal authority; however, at this point the Pope didn’t have an army under his control so the territories were still lawless.) Forcing his way through Campania and organizing a supply corridor along the coast, where the still-powerful Byzantine navy could support the few troops guarding it, Alexius’ army moved north and gathered a few mercenaries as it went, although not nearly as many as Leo Phocas’ disastrous force of a decade prior. The Byzantine army went through Rome with great popular support (apparently, the ancient principle of not allowing an army to cross the pomerium had been all but forgotten now, since the first time, with Sulla) and cheering, although they were forced away from serving with the elite force. As Otto, fuming, sat through a siege of Florence made stauncher by the defenders’ belief that they would be rescued, Alexius, in sharp contrast to the German King, was in high spirits, leading an army to protect the Pope, and all Christendom, from a Christian Emperor. What a thing that would have been even a few decades ago, and what a thing it was now! By the time Otto had extricated his army from the plunder of Florence, Alexius was within reach of Pisa.

At this juncture, the King of Germany had a brain flash, born of desperation. He would send a picked force of only 20,000 men on ships down the Arno River, to try to coerce the Pisans into surrender and provide him with the means of trapping Alexius in a siege. The Germans outfitted an army for rapid transport by river and commandeered much of the civil traffic through Florence, and the 20,000 men, with Conrad of Styria at their head, set sail in record time. Two days later, the army was drawn up below the walls of Pisa, with Conrad threatening a siege if the city was not surrendered immediately. But the imminent approach of the Byzantine army straightened the backbone of the Pisans, who steadfastly refused Conrad the surrender. Reluctantly, the German army sat down to a siege, with special emphasis on making a quick assault. Indeed, many siege engines had been brought down from Florence, and soon they were battering away at the walls of the city. Conrad actually began to think that the Germans could smash their way in before Alexius’ approach, and he ordered the efforts redoubled. Faced with the total destruction of their city, with huge, gaping holes knocked in their walls only protected by a few hundred citizen soldiers, the Pisan leaders reluctantly agreed to allow Conrad entrance. Gleefully, the Germans swept in and were so happy that they limited the pillaging to only a few hours before work started on making the city indefensible again.

At that point, Alexius appeared with his great host. Taking note of the great destruction directed at the city, and the siege engines (although few) that had been left outside the walls by the Germans in their haste, the Byzantine Emperor soon decided upon a blockade for a few days and then an assault. Conrad could not easily defend against this, and he now was limited to the supplies the Pisans had had when they surrendered. The Germans, now pressed into defending their new gains with a hostile populace and gaping holes in their defenses, held out for the three days of the blockade and about five hours’ worth of assault. Then, Conrad was forced to capitulate, and about 7,500 of the Germans were forced into captivity, although it would tie up too many resources to keep them prisoner. Eventually, Alexius sent Conrad and his soldiers back to the King of Germany without their weapons.

The implications of the slow German advance during Otto’s absence are clear. If the Germans had been able to move faster, the Pisans would probably have surrendered without the destruction to their walls, and the Germans would have been able to occupy a fortress city with its defenses intact, and perhaps then Conrad could have held off Alexius long enough for Otto to arrive. As it was, now Otto had lost a large portion of his field army, and now he had some men without weapons. The latter problem could be solved easier than the first. Otto, now with about 40,000 men, moved back north towards the Adige, counting on it as a defensive barrier. As his army reached Modena, he heard of Bohemund’s approach to Mantua and ordered only 1,000 men to be left there out of the 5,000-man garrison, which further strengthened his army but kept the city there as a bastion to prevent Bohemund from reaching the Adige before he could. As summer waned, Otto reached the Po, crossed it (and left a few troops in Chioggia, too, which the Venetians had abandoned in their haste to withdraw from Ravenna during disastrous June), and reached the safety of the Adige River. During the fall, as he licked his wounds and gathered more men from Germany, he was met with the words that Robert Guiscard had finally succumbed to his illness, and Bohemund was now King of Burgundy and Duke of the French possessions of the Hautevilles. His brother Tancred was now King of Iberia.

The critical campaign of 1092 had perhaps saved the Pope and perhaps the cause of Christianity, but could the alliance, now fractured by the loss of one of its integral partners, still persevere and triumph over the King of Germany?


Note: I've actually finished the war in its entirety, but I like the idea of a cliffhanger. Besides, I foolishly finished the "State of the World" up to 1091 as it was, so it makes some sense to stop here. The issue is still in doubt!

...and if you wanted to hear about India and China, go to hell. It's too long anyway.

 

[North King]

Very long, but quite interesting. A few charges of bias (the usual, Byzantines winning too frequently (yes, I know they're in "hard times", but they're still winning more than they should)), and so on, but nothing truly deadly to the integrity of your timeline. Do continue.

EDIT: And mind that you don't make India piss-poor and unable to defend against Turkish advances; otherwise I shall be forced to hunt you down.

And the Shahdom of Khwarezm is rather anachronistic, TBH.

 

[Cuivienen]

And the Shahdom of Khwarezm is rather anachronistic, TBH.

According to Wikipedia, it was founded in 1077.

Edit: Well, it didn't become a Shahdom until 1205.

 

[North King]

Odd. According to the Historical Atlas of the Medieval World by John Haywood, 1210 was the foundation of the Khwarizm. Before that, it appears to have been mostly part of the Seljuk Sultanate, though upon further examination, the anachronism isn't that bad, given that the Khwarizmi were around before the foundation of their actual shahdom.

It appears wiki mostly agrees with that timeline.

So, it's not a bad thing, but it would be much more sensible to make the thing the Seljuks.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Nice stuff Sym. I'm looking forward to seeing how the Pacific war turns out.

 

[Symphony D.]

I get the feeling you're just saying that because the Canadians kicked ass. 1st Army's performance in the Scheldt OTL was pretty impressive though, so it seemed reasonable for them to do similar rotated to different objectives. They'll be back later for some more strange exploits.

 

[Dachs]

Very long, but quite interesting. A few charges of bias (the usual, Byzantines winning too frequently (yes, I know they're in "hard times", but they're still winning more than they should)), and so on, but nothing truly deadly to the integrity of your timeline. Do continue.

Well, Alexius was there and restored things pretty fast - doing a little better than OTL due to the willingness of his Sadaqid allies to help, but yeah, I have something of an ingrown reluctance to let anything bad happen to Byzantium.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I get the feeling you're just saying that because the Canadians kicked ass. 1st Army's performance in the Scheldt OTL was pretty impressive though, so it seemed reasonable for them to do similar rotated to different objectives. They'll be back later for some more strange exploits.

Meh, that had nothing to do with my comment. WW2 alts are just fun to read.

 

[das]

Nice start Drake. I suspect that there might be a Spanish intervention in an English civil war. Not to mention Scottish and French...

Dachspmg, again, good timeline. Byzantine bias was already brought up; aside from that, really good work, tying the various events and trends together into something realistic is often quite difficult, especially before things go properly mad and detached from the OTL. Well done, in other words; in you, I sense much skill. Like the obligatory historical ironies and coincidences, too.

And now, for the very fun part - i.e. the nitpicks!

When the Pope, anxious to have Norman support, ordered the King aside, it was one enemy too many, and Philip I abandoned the project.

How many divisions has the Pope? Skipping that, how many brain cells? Burgundy clearly doesn't look like a state that could last long, whereas France was always the Pope's best (and most expensive) card to play against the HRE. The Popes traditionally had to bend over backwards to appease the French. By asking the Normans to help, Vatican has seriously jeopardized its position, though upon pondering on this more I agree that perhaps the Normans seemed like a better short-term solution. Nonetheless I doubt France would've backed away like that.

allowing the Emperor all of his conquests in Poland thus far and allowing de facto Imperial control over the lands of the Wends in Pomerania. Satisfied with his takings thus far, Henry returned to Germany after creating a duchy there.

I rather doubt that he would be satisfied with just that. Poland was another one of those cards the Popes usually played against the Emperor; after such a victory, it would have been best (and most realistic) for the Emperor to vassalize it as well.

The ambitious Leo rode to Constantinople and forced the Patriarch to crown him Emperor, then returned to Syria to try to bargain with Fuad.

Surprised nobody took power for himself as soon as Leo set out for Aleppo.

Kievan Rus [...] mercenaries

Don't recall any Kievan mercenaries back then; most Rusite warriors were pretty busy killing each other in a wide variety of civil wars, they had no time to seek foreign opportunities. And the late 11th century was one of the most violent times, before 1097.

The Anatolian soldiers had been robbed of their soldiers by the Phocas

No comment necessary, I believe.

Btw, somewhat I doubt that the Sadaqids will hold on to Mesopatamia. Taking it for a while, however, is perfectly possible.

Another not-quite-nitpick - could we have a map? It could be very helpful. In any case, I sadly only now realized that the Burgundy in question is the "southern" one (as opposed to the more famous 15th century "northern" one). Keep getting those mixed up, so was confused by some of the events there until I realized this. :embarassed: Anyway, interesting to see how a surviving (and powerful) Kingdom of Burgundy would affect things later on. If France is kept weak enough, Burgundy would have a really neat strategic position.

Back to nitpicks: why would the Anglo-Saxons invade France? They scarcely have anything to gain from there; makes much more sense for them to conquer the Isles instead.

since Henry IV’s accession

Technically this might be right, but I do think you mean Henry V.

the traditional trade routes

Which happened to favour Rus more than many others. Unless you are reffering to more ancient traditions, ofcourse.

Nice epic war at the end.

I have something of an ingrown reluctance to let anything bad happen to Byzantium.

Fight it, Dachs, fight it. Although, you don't seem to be doing too bad, the first post was a series of disasters for die Byzantinisches Reich. Your Norman bias is more alarming, however.

Meh, that had nothing to do with my comment. WW2 alts are just fun to read.

Or, at least, provide variety. Sorry, not much of a WWII fan.

Oh, and about Khwarezm: it was founded in 1070s in OTL, but had a civil war in 1150s and later, after which it became a shahdom, ascended to the height of its power and then came down crashing.

 

[Symphony D.]

WW2 alts are just fun to read.

Mrm. Well, I hope it goes for Moderns, because it just happens to start in WWII, certainly doesn't end anywhere nearby.

 

[das]

Um... this was supposed to be a 1500 world map for Canute universe. Well, technically it is, but I got a bit carried away with butterfly effects. Still, let us consider this one way it COULD turn out.

EDIT: EDITTED.

 

[Disenfrancised]

Nice, but what is the capital of Viking-britain meant to be? Nottingham? Lincoln? Boston? Louth? Just seems in an odd place.

 

[das]

TECHNICALLY I had my hopes on it being York/Yorvick. But apparently it indeed isn't, so lets assume they moved for some reason.